Cat’s Cradle Back Room

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There is a collective energy in Nashville, one that Liz Cooper has poured herself into for the past six years. Liz remarks that the energy in Nashville today is akin to that of Greenwich Village in 1960s New York or the Laurel Canyon days in the 1960s and 1970s and is a product of a collaborative approach to music and art. This community has allowed Liz to be a part of many magically haphazard nights, where the movers and shakers of the Nashville music world, such as Okey Dokey, Becca Mancari, Rayland Baxter, Desert Noises, Morning Teleportation, Erin Rae, Brittany Howard, Cage the Elephant, Michael Nau and many more converge to make music and art and lose track of time. Her latest album is a product of that pulsating energy in Nashville that has had some of the greatest influence in her work. Window Flowers is the culmination of a year where Liz made a purposeful effort to do something creative every day. Whether it was directly related to music or not, this creative process challenged and inspired her to continually put herself in new situations and pushed her to become a better songwriter and guitar player. The tentative newcomer that is present in her early recordings was all but gone in the making of the album. Her absorption into the collaborative community is evidenced by guest appearances on Window Flowers including Will Brown (Michael Nau) on the keys, Michael and Ben Ford (Airpark) bgv’s/ guitar and songwriting, Gianni Gibson (Future Thieves) percussion, Leah Blevins on BGV’s, Emily Kohavi (Kacey Musgraves, Eminem etc.) on violin and Steve Dawson on pedal steel. Liz Cooper & The Stampede and their guests spent five days tracking Window Flowers at Welcome to 1979 in Nashville, Tennessee. TJ Elias, who co-produced the album with the band, sparked the relationship by approaching Liz one night backstage at The Ryman Auditorium after hearing her songs through a mutual friend and musician, Cody Huggins. Window Flowers is a collection of music that deals with the weight of mundanity, and politely tells it to fuck off. When listening to “Sleepyhead” you hear remembrances of her early Nashville recordings, mixed with the powerful assertion that this is Liz Cooper, a force that will continue to shape and mold her own course of creating music. Whether you see Liz Cooper & The Stampede in a dive bar or a theater venue, you feel like you are being transported to another time and place. People often remark that her music takes them back to the 60s and 70s, when rock-n-roll felt alive, and bigger than oneself. The album will be released on Sleepyhead Records via Thirty Tigers (Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell) August 10, 2018. Coming off their busiest year to-date, including playing Austin City Limits Festival for the first time in 2017, Liz Cooper & The Stampede have spent the first few months of 2018 touring with Lord Huron, Deer Tick, Rayland Baxter, Ron Gallo and Blitzen Trapper. The band will continue touring this year with Houndmouth, Tyler Childers and will play Firefly Festival and LouFest. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram| SoundCloud | Spotify | YouTube

Spit from the heart of America’s Rust Belt, arising from a night of flophouse violence. Drifting across the states, they cemented their sound in Portland, OR and later in Los Angeles, CA, where they lived in abandoned buildings, squatter camps, storage units and shoebox apartments. In 2007, they left everything behind and spent the next 4 years living out of whatever vehicle would get them to the next town. Building upon their original sound of twanged-out, punk rock gutterbilly (Life of Sin 2004 and Gutterbillyblues 2007), they began picking up stray musicians along the way and adding to their sound; washboard, accordion, mandolin and banjo (Ghost of the Rails 2009 and 7 Devils 2011) creating a sound referred to as “hobocore”, “gypsy-punk” or “americana-punk”, while never being stuck in any one sound. Enter 2018 and The Goddamn Gallows have reinvented themselves once again with The Trial. From rockabilly, psychobilly and punk rock, to bluegrass and metal, The Trial infuses disparate sounds into a new strange recipe of seamless genre bending profundities. Chock full of impromptu antics of the shocking variety and hauntingly eclectic instrumentation, The Goddamn Gallows have made legions of fans with their legendary, live shows. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify This is not your Grandparents’ folk music. The Bridge City Sinners take folk songs in the direction of a punk rocker. A rowdy folksy mosaic of banjo, violin, guitar, mandolin, upright bass, & ukulele. The Sinners started their journey as a rotating cast of friends in 2016 who just wanted to play music on the streets “busk” in Portland, Oregon. They have transitioned into a powerful force playing festivals in 2018 such as Vans Warped Tour, NW String Summit, the Fest, & Seattle Folklife Festival. Before the Bridge City Sinners, lead singer Libby Lux and upright bass player Scott Michaud infrequently started playing music together on the streets of Portland, Oregon over eight years ago. Without rehearsal, nor a plan, a few times a year they would meet up with other various street musicians to sing and yell at passer byers. Years before that, on their separate journeys, they traveled, hitch-hiked, and howled at the moon across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In hobo fashion, they earned what they’d eat and roofs over their heads by the papers and coins tossed into their hat. Through their years of wandering, they were able to pick up a rich catalog of songs passed through the traveling / busking community. In 2012, their mutual best friend and lead singer of folk-punk band Profane Sass, passed away when he fell off a train in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In a way the Bridge City Sinners are a homage to keep his spirit alive and continue passing along the music they all sang together on the streets, hidden in trains, and in living rooms across the continent. They formed the Bridge City Sinners in the Winter of 2016. Links: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Spotify

What is “One Hit Wonders”? Thirty-three of those One Hit Wonder songs from the 60’s to the 00’s. Songs you love and hate, sometimes at the same time. Presented to you by some of the luminaries of the Triangle music scene (check out the poster). Take a trip back in time, when radio was king. You won’t be able to not sing along, and why would you try? This event has been a blast elsewhere, and now it will be a blast at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room!

Joe Newberry Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | SoundCloud Jess Klein Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | SoundCloud | YouTube Wyatt Easterling Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

Sunny SlopesJohn Jaquiss, Bill Tarman, Casey Cook, Kent Howard, Josh Bratch Links: Facebook | SoundCloud Speed Stick Geeked out drummers Laura King, and Tom Simpson bring you heavy improvisational drum performance based on sweating, and blasting out the freshest beats. Sharing a kick drum they use their psychic connection to forward movement and exploration. Links: Facebook

Shark Quest Comprised of a virtual who’s-who of the local Triangle (NC) music scene of the late ’90s, Shark Quest draws on a myriad of styles, melding individual influences & talents to create something that is definitively their own. Dusty pop melds with elements of surf guitar, bluegrass, traditional folk, bossa nova, Sufi-western, & neoclassical baroque to create a sound that is uniquely Shark Quest. Links: Bandcamp The Shoaldiggers The Shoaldiggers’ nine pieces produce a one of a kind sound that is completely unique, yet familiar enough to embrace. From rolling seascapes to the hollers of the smokey mountains, Shoaldiggers shows are a swamp grass blast! Links: Website | Facebook | Spotify Mystery Ranch Links: Facebook

4ortyThoux Links: SoundCloud Lil Bobby Links: SoundCloud Fend! Links: SoundCloud D1G Links: SoundCloud Clip Links: SoundCloud

For a guy whose career has evolved more by serendipity than design, Ben Dickey’s professional journey has turned into one heckuva ride. It’s not every day an obscure musician’s famous actor/director friend hands him the lead in a passion-project indie film, and he not only winds up sharing the screen with one of his musical heroes, he also wins a Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize for Dramatic Achievement in Acting – and a Variety magazine “for your consideration” plug for a Best Actor Oscar nomination. 

Dickey’s acting debut in Blaze, Ethan Hawke’s biopic about doomed Texas singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, has already led to more roles, including their pairing as bounty hunters in The Kid, a western directed by Vincent D’Onofrio. But just as exciting, as far as Dickey’s concerned, is the opportunity it provided to record with that musical hero, longtime Bob Dylan guitarist Charlie Sexton (who played Blaze’s other troubled Texas songwriting legend, Townes Van Zandt). After they did the film’s original cast recording (on Light in the Attic Records), Sexton produced Dickey’s solo album, A Glimmer on the Outskirts. That inspired Sexton, Hawke and Blaze executive producer Louis Black to form SexHawkeBlack Records, a new Austin-based imprint under the umbrella of Nashville’s Dualtone Records. Dickey’s March 7, 2019 release is the label’s first. It’s hardly Dickey’s first recording foray, however. In fact, he says, he preferred the idea of forming a label to shopping for one because he’d been signed before – and still bears scars from watching the dream morph into a momentum-sucking nightmare. But SexHawkeBlack president Erika Pinktipps happens to be friends with Dualtone’s founder; that connection quickly turned into an actual alliance. “We’re all doing this together,” Dickey says, “ a group of people who all care about each other and have similar artistic arrows pointed in the same direction.” Dickey was 10 when his artistic arrow started pointing toward music; that’s when his grandfather handed down his 1935 Gibson L-30 archtop. “He was a magical fellow, and his guitar is, too,” Dickey says. “So I wanted to be magic, too.” 

Within a year, his grandfather was gone. The magic, fortunately, stayed. But conjuring it wasn’t always easy for a kid growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, far from his dad – a college football star who’d moved to Georgia after the parental split, when Dickey was 4. Ten years later, Dickey’s mother left, too – following her friend and boss, Bill Clinton, from the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion to the White House. Dickey moved into his grandmother’s basement – and became one more angry, disaffected teenage rocker. 

He formed his first “real” band, Shake Ray Turbine, at 16, made his first record at 17 and began touring at 18, ditching Little Rock Central High (most famous students: the Little Rock Nine) for an $850 Ford van. When the founder of their D.I.Y. label, File 13 Records, headed to Philadelphia for college, they followed. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify